


they don’t sing songs for me

by mandalorianed



Category: Star Wars - All Media Types, Star Wars Episode VII: The Force Awakens (2015), Star Wars: The Clone Wars (2008) - All Media Types
Genre: Friendship, Gen, Heroism, Redemption, accidental adoption, and what it feels like to be the only person left alive of an entire generation, look i don't know how to tag this it's about family and love and what it takes to be a hero
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-04-13
Updated: 2017-04-13
Packaged: 2018-10-18 14:28:50
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 8,936
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/10618848
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/mandalorianed/pseuds/mandalorianed
Summary: Asajj Ventress had fallen off the pages of the galaxy’s history books years ago, but that doesn’t stop the Force from reeling her back in when it needs her, reeling her all the way to Jakku and a feral desert child who burns bright in the Force.





	

**Author's Note:**

> I originally came up with the idea for this fic because I wanted to write about Rey’s childhood, but then I threw Asajj into the mix because I refuse to acknowledge _Dark Disciple_. So I guess, technically, this is a very oblique fix-it fic. Mostly it’s an excuse to write two of my favorite ladies interacting. Also some Finn/Rey snuck in there too. Whoops.
> 
> Also, as sidebar: cw for menstruation and discussion of canon typical violence.

The first time Rey meets her (the trader, that is), she’s six, or, at least, she thinks she is. It’s hard to keep track on Jakku, where time is rarely divided into such strict divisions as years. She had been on the planet for a full two cycles, two burning hot summers and two winters where the nights were so cold she almost froze. She had gone from being at eyelevel for a GNK droid to being able to reach under the hood to the XP-40 speeder in the junk yard to mess with the wiring. She had scratched six hundred and seventeen thin lines into the wall by her bed in the back room of Unkar’s junk shop. She’s six. Ish.

In those days, she’d been splitting her time between Niima Outpost and the Graveyard, spending most of her early mornings, before the sun got too hot, out with the roving scavenger gangs. She was still too young to scavenge on her own back then—no tools and she was too small to reach the hand holds to climb up into the upper levels of the downed star destroyers—but she was the perfect size to crawl through ducts and ventilation shafts where the bigger scavengers couldn’t reach. They paid Unkar for the privilege of having such a small creature with such nimble, clever hands and quick wit with them out in the Graveyard, and Unkar passed it on to her by giving her an extra portion or, if he was feeling particularly generous, a bit of unspoiled tech—old engines or droid brains or ancient nav computers—to tinker with. But the scavengers paid her too, since staying on her good side meant that she’d bring back all the good bits of wiring and scrap she found instead of keeping back the choice finds for Unkar. They showed her the best places for scrap, how to tell if the structure of a downed ship was sound, how to repair broken tools or damaged scrap. Useful things, the kind of things she would need to know when she was old enough and big enough to scavenge for herself, old enough and big enough to get out of Unkar’s back room. But the afternoons, those she spent in Niima, watching the travelers who came to refuel their ships, doing her own brand of scavenging for Unkar. She was good at choosing marks, even better at lifting their credits without them noticing, and she had a kind of sixth sense for avoiding trouble. That’s how she met the trader, with her hand still in the woman’s credit pouch.

It’s just past midday, when the Jakku sun is the hottest, and Rey has been standing under the overhang for one of the cleaning stations, watching the travelers come and go. She had noticed the trader immediately. Tall, wearing a dark, expensive looking half-cloak even in the oppressive heat, hood pulled up over her head and shadowing her face. Well to do, or, at least, more well to do than travelers on Jakku generally were. And, well, Rey had a _feeling_ about her. And so, she had slipped around the back of the cleaning stations, checked for Constable Zuvio or any of his enforcers, and then came up behind the woman, planning to lift the pouch of credits she’d seen dangling off the woman’s belt, just below the hem of the cloak. She almost manages it, too, but then the woman’s hand snaps out, catching Rey’s wrist in a strangling grip. In the moment, Rey notices two things: first, the woman’s other hand has fallen to the grip of the blaster holstered at her hip, and second, there is nothing kind about the woman’s gaunt face. She has dark lips, and dark tribal tattoos arching across her chalky skin, and hard dark eyes.

“That doesn’t belong to you,” she says, some accent Rey doesn’t recognize stretching the syllables into a purr.

At least, Rey thinks, she hasn’t pulled her blaster. But she also isn’t letting go, tight grip beginning to cut off circulation to Rey’s hand, and she doesn’t budge even when Rey tries to yank her hand back, throwing her full body weight away from her. The woman’s eyes narrow.

“What’s your name, little one.”

Rey juts her chin out and doesn’t answer. The woman arches one thin eyebrow.

“Don’t try my patience, or I just might hand you over to whatever passes for security on this kriff-backwards planet.”

Rey doesn’t bother to adjust her petulant expression, but says, “Rey.”

“Rey what?”

Rey frowns.

“Just Rey.”

The woman hums, something about the tone of it suggesting that she doesn’t think much of Rey’s answer, or the situation in general.

“And what were you planning on doing with my credits, Rey?”

She had been planning to pass the credits off to Unkar, but she senses that that isn’t quite the right answer in this particular situation.

“I’m hungry,” Rey says.

It’s technically true. She’s always hungry. The woman eyes her, and Rey is gripped by the sudden conviction that she knows Rey is lying or, at least, not telling the whole truth. But whatever the woman is thinking, she doesn’t pursue it, just turns and walks further into town, dragging Rey behind her. She digs her heels in, trying to jerk away, but the woman’s grip is too tight, and, besides, after a moment Rey realizes that she isn’t being taken to the Constable’s headquarters anyway. Instead, the woman is walking towards the low building on the outskirts of town that houses the planet’s only proper cantina. They go through the door, and then down the flight of steps into the cool, if slightly sour smelling, interior. The woman nods towards the bartender, a sour looking Devaronian who is missing one horn, and then holds up two slender fingers of her free hand.

“Two ration packs,” she says in huttese. “And two glasses of mead, half strength.”

The Devaronian eyes Rey for a moment, and then shrugs and reaches under the counter. The woman, meanwhile, releases Rey’s wrist, and then plants a hand between her shoulder blades to propel her towards one of the booths near the back of the cantina. The place is full of scavengers and traders trying to escape the heat, but quiet. The heat tends to dry up the conversation as efficiently as it dries up everything else. Rey sits down across from the woman, and they don’t speak, just watch each other silently until the bartender drops their food in front of them. Rey digs into her ration pack immediately and drinks the sweet, watered down mead, never one to pass up food when it’s available. It’s only afterwards, once she’s finished and licked the inside of the ration pack clean, that she turns her eyes back towards the woman, who had eaten as silently as Rey had, and asks the question that’s been hanging over the table.

“What do you want from me?”

The woman raises an eyebrow.

“For the food, I mean.”

The woman shrugs.

“I hadn’t thought that far ahead. But I suppose you could tell me how a girl like you,” she puts an emphasis on the last two words that Rey doesn’t quite understand. “Ends up in a place like this.”

Rey frowns. Food for information she knows and trusts. Food for information about _herself_ she doesn’t. The woman seems to sense this, and then sighs and gestures towards herself with a languid hand.

“I’m a trader from the mid rim,” she pauses. Then, although Rey had been sure she was about say something else, she adds, “Asajj.”

Rey wrinkles her nose.

“Asajj what.”

That gets a tiny hint of a smile.

“Just Asajj to you, brat. How did you get here,” she asks again, eyes strangely serious. “There aren’t many children on Jakku.”

“I’m waiting,” Rey says after a moment. And then, to clarify. “For my family.”

“Your family left you on this rock?”

Asajj’s voice is harsh with disgust, and Rey bristles, springing to her feet.

“I can take care of myself. And they’re coming back soon anyway.”

Asajj’s brow has furrowed, and she holds up a placating hand.

“Alright.”

“They are,” Rey says again. And then she turns and runs.

 

Asajj finds her later, though, when the sun has already set and the full, pale glory of the stars has spread itself across the night sky. Rey is in the back of the junkyard where no one was supposed to be able to find her, even Unkar, but somehow Asajj finds her anyway. She has abandoned the cloak from the afternoon, and Rey can see now that she has straight white hair that hangs to her chin, shimmering silver in the starlight. She’s of an indeterminate age, one of those species that stops visibly aging after a certain point, except for around the eyes. Rey thinks that she has very old eyes.

“I didn’t mean to upset you,” Asajj says after a moment, clearly carefully weighing each word. “Just to offer you a way off planet, if you wanted it.”

“I can’t leave,” Rey says immediately.

Asajj hums quietly, and then seats herself next to Rey on the sand, leaving a respectable distance between them. Rey pauses, surprised by the company, but then returns to what she had been doing, which was lying on her back and watching the stars. The sand is hot against her skin, and there is a warm breeze, but Rey is comfortable. Beside her, Asajj leans back on her forearms, and then, after a moment, points up at one of the brighter stars in the sky.

“That’s the Auratera system, I think,” she says. “I just came from there.”

Rey perks up a little at that. She rarely has the chance to really hear about other planets, only occasionally overhearing bits and pieces from the traders and smugglers that come through Niima.

“What’s it like?”

“Wet. Forests over most of the planet, too. I was running an errand for an,” she pauses and frowns. “An associate. Pulling a relic out of the old Jedi temple there.”

Rey shoots upright and turns towards Asajj.

“A Jedi temple? Really?”

Asajj’s eyes slide sideways to consider Rey. It had clearly not been the reaction she had been expecting.

“Yes,” she replies after a pause. “It’s been abandoned for at least a hundred years. Since before the Republic fell.”

Old, Rey thinks again. Only people who had lived under the old Republic ever called it that. To most of the scavengers and traders and smugglers that cycle through Niima, the Republic is the government currently operating off of Chandrila. Distant, unimportant to life on Jakku, but present nonetheless. But that isn’t what is foremost in her mind.

“What’s it like?”

Asajj turns her eyes back towards the stars before she speaks again.

“Big. Crumbling. Huge statues of the knights guarding the door. Not that exciting, really.”

Rey doesn’t believe that, so she tries to imagine it, but her only frame of reference is standing in the center of one of the blown out hangers of the star destroyers in the Graveyard. Huge, echoing spaces with sand underfoot and wires and beams torn apart and crisscrossing the space. It probably wasn’t like that at all.

“One of the villages believes in that kind of thing,” she says after a moment. “But I’m not sure if I do.”

“Believes what?”

Rey shrugs.

“The Force. The Jedi.” She peers up at Asajj. “Tell me about them?”

Asajj has an unreadable expression on her face but, after a moment, she speaks.

“They were… Guardians, I suppose, of a sort. Creatures of light.”

There’s an emotion in her voice that Rey can’t quite place. It’s something like sorrow, something like spite. But she tries to imagine the Jedi. Tall as Unkar. No, taller. With long hair and wise, kind faces, and they glow as if they were made of the pure white fire of the Jakku sun at midday.

“They fought in a long war,” Asajj continues, but Rey interrupts her.

“Against the dark?” she asks, leaning towards Asajj. She knows these kinds of stories. The scavengers tell them around the fires late at night.

“Yes,” Asajj says, frowning slightly, although Rey is pretty sure that she’s not the one being frowned at. “Yes, against the dark. They fought, and then the dark won, and now all of them are dead.”

Rey frowns. That isn’t like the endings of the stories the scavengers tell.

“I think you’re telling this story wrong,” she tells Asajj very seriously. “For one thing, there’s no hero, and the hero is supposed to win.”

The corner of Asajj’s mouth twitches.

“Alright, alright. That isn’t the end of the story. Twenty years after the war, there was a new Jedi named Luke Skywalker. All the old Jedi were gone, so he was a new kind of Jedi, and there were only two men left who served the dark. He fought them, and that time he won.”

That seems more right, Rey thinks. She adds Luke Skywalker to her imagined scene, standing in front of the other Jedi and glowing with an even brighter light. And then, diametrically opposed to him, tall twisted forms, like shadows made solid, with the glowing red eyes of the nightwatcher worms that live under the sand between villages. She imagines them clashing with Skywalker and his glowing light overwhelming them, wiping them away in the same way snapping on a glowrod drives out the shadows that lurk in the corners of dark rooms. It must be nice, she thinks, to burn with so much power that the shadows can’t touch you. Beside her, something in Asajj’s pocket chimes, and she pulls out a chronometer before sighing.

“I have a schedule to keep,” she says.

There’s something faintly regretful in the turn of her mouth. And then she reaches into her other pocket, pulls out something in a closed fist, and then drops several credit chips into Rey’s hand.

“For you,” she says, and then pokes Rey in the chest. “You, not Unkar Plutt. Stay smart, brat.”

Rey nods, and then watches Asajj walk away. She keeps those credits in a bag around her neck and, three years later, uses them to buy her first set of scavenging tools.

 

* * *

 

The next time Asajj finds herself on Jakku, her approach vector takes her down on the dark side of the planet. She’s in a new ship, too, because the First Order is shifting in the Unknown Regions, and war, even an informal one, is always good for business. She eases back on the throttle, comes in a little steeper than she really should so she can feel the G-forces tugging at her a little bit as the ship’s artificial gravity tries to compensate for the change. The planet is spread out dark beneath her, except for the small circle of dull lights that is Niima Outpost. That’s where she sets down, in a gust of wind and sand.

The heat hits her as ever when she finally steps off the ship, like a heavy, hot slap across the front of her body. The nights are always cooler than the days on Jakku, but, during the summer, that isn’t saying much. She stands in the airlock, looking out over Niima, and finally lets herself search for the little feral desert child who had drawn her back over and over to this Force forsaken planet. She always hopes that the girl has finally come to her senses and hopped a ship off planet or, admittedly without much conviction, that her family really had come back for her. But no such luck on that front. Rey burns with a casual brightness in the Force, a bright, clean light that is, perhaps, a little diffuse due to her lack of training, but still unmistakable. It reminds Asajj a little bit of what it had been like to stand in a room with Anakin Skywalker, who burned so fierce and bright it almost hurt. Not like Kenobi, who glowed like fluorescent glowrods, revealing the nearly invisible flaws in everything, or Tano, who felt like the sun on Shili, warm and friendly but also unrelenting. All dead now, but Asajj remembered them all.

The Force twists around her now, like twin lothcats rubbing at her ankles. The darker one pulls towards the cantina on the edge of town where, if the sounds of carousing are any indication, there is a party in full swing. But the lighter one pulls towards Rey. Asajj tries to walk the line between them, but today she follows the lighter path.

 

She rides her speeder fast and hard, whipping over the sand, heading decided only by the tug of the Force in her gut, and knows she’s come to the right place when a downed AT-AT looms up out of the darkness, slumped on its side like a dead bantha brought down in the hunt. There’s a decrepit looking XP model speeder, half pulled to pieces, that Asajj pulls up beside, shutting down her speeder before she pauses, listening. There’s no light on within the walker, although Asajj can sense Rey inside, and the only sound is the gentle tink of sand blowing against metal and the tics of her speeder’s engine cooling down. There’s no answer, either, when she finally stands and hammers on the maintenance hatch that she presumes passes for a door. She pounds at the door again.

“Rey,” she shouts, voice cracking the nighttime silence wide open. “I know you’re in there.”

There’s still no response, but Asajj can feel her presence coalescing into a more focused shape. It’s tinted with something though, something like pain or fear. Asajj curls the Force around the lock and opens the hatch, grabbing a glowrod off her belt and raising it over her head. The interior of the walker is clean enough, and the glowrod casts a pale blue glow over some basic cooking utensils, a few scavenged computers spread out across a work bench, and, in the very back, a still shape wrapped up in a hammock strung between two interior struts.

“Rey,” she says quietly, and the shape shifts until Rey’s head emerges from the folds of fabric.

“Asajj,” the girl says. “What’re you doing here?”

Asajj isn’t sure if the girl means “here” as in in the walker or “here” as in on Jakku, but she dismisses the question with a quiet hum, finally finding the switch to the light that had been messily welded to the ceiling and flicking it on. The space fills with a golden glow.

“What’s wrong,” Asajj asks.

Rey swallows, and then juts her chin out a little and says with a perfectly steady voice, despite the fear still twined through her Force signature, “I think I’m dying.”

Now that Asajj knows can’t be true. She doesn’t say that.

“What makes you think that?”

Rey swallows shallowly.

“I feel sick,” she says quietly. And then it all comes out in a rush. “And I’m _bleeding_. And there was an outbreak of the flux a couple villages over, and the other scavengers were saying that those people were bleeding out of their _eyeballs_.”

Asajj crosses her arms across her chest.

“And are you bleeding out of your eyeballs?”

“Well, no. But I’m bleeding a _lot_ ,” she says, and then frees an arm from her hammock cocoon to point down at the floor.

And, in fact, there is a pair of tan pants on the floor, tacky with blood. Asajj doesn’t laugh, mostly because it would be cruel, and she has no desire to be cruel to this little desert child. And, she realizes with a rush of something like fondness, that it is just like this girl to deduce that she’s dying and then face it head on, unblinking. Someday, Asajj thinks, she’s going to end up starring death in the face and daring it to fight her, completely unafraid.

“You’re not dying,” she says instead. “It’s…”

She pauses then, realizing that she has no idea how precisely the human female reproductive system works. She knows the five most vulnerable points on a human female’s body, where to put pressure to extract information, but that isn’t helpful just now. Danthomiri women don’t undergo anything of the sort, and the only reason she even knows what menstruation is, is that she once spent half a year in forced close quarters with a very chatty human female.

“It’s a human female… thing,” she says finally. “You’re not dying, it’s natural. It happens once a month.”

Rey looks horrified.

“Once a month? Why?”

Asajj shrugs and gestures at herself.

“Do I look human?”

The corner of Rey’s mouth twitches, and then she asks, “Ok, but what do I do? I can’t go around like—” She stutters to a stop, gestures to the pants on the floor.

Asajj sighs, and then turns on her heel to return to the speeder. She has a medkit packed into one of the storage compartments, and in it there’s a stash of wound packers, long strips of super absorbent fiber. She gives the whole stack to Rey.

“These will work for now,” she says. “You’ll have to talk to some human woman to figure out a long term solution.”

Rey nods, and then Asajj turns and leaves the walker again.

 

Asajj has perched herself on the top of the walker, watching the stars, when Rey finally joins her. She’s wrapped a sheet around her waist, and she looks older in the starlight. She’s taller now, even taller than the last time Asajj saw her, and, as Asajj figures it, she’s in her early teens now, or about to be, at any rate. She has her hair bound up in three little buns, though, just like the last time Asajj saw her. They sit side by side, a gap between them, and Rey looks up at the stars as well.

“Do you have a story for me this time?” she asks, glancing over at Asajj.

Asajj smiles faintly and then shrugs.

“You know I’m not very good at telling stories,” she says.

“I do,” Rey says, grinning. “It’s ok. Can you tell me more about the Jedi?”

She’s spent more time thinking about the Jedi on Jakku than she has anywhere else in the thirty years since she felt Tano slip sideways into the Force. She sighs.

“I suppose. What do you want to know?”

Rey chews on her lip for a moment, and then says, “Do you know any stories about their heroes?”

Asajj looks up at the stars again, burning bright against the dark of the sky.

“I’m not sure there’s such a thing, kid.”

“That’s why I like the stories,” Rey says, shrugging one shoulder.

Asajj hums quietly, mentally flicking back fifty years. The only stories she knows that don’t feature her trying to kill the “heroes” are the ones Tano told her later. Except…

“Alright,” Asajj says, keeping her eyes on the stars. “There was a Jedi once, one of the few to survive the fall of the Republic. She was… strong. Stronger than most of the Jedi. And after the fall, she kept up the fight—”

“Against the dark,” Rey finishes.

“Against the dark,” Asajj echoes. And then, taking a fierce pleasure in referring to Sidious in such a manner, “And the dark’s two apprentices. One of those two apprentices was someone she had known, someone who had been a Jedi. A friend.”

Here Rey stops her, a hand on Asajj’s arm, and she looks over at the girl.

“Jedi can go dark?”

Asajj raises an eyebrow.

“Does that really surprise you?”

That seems to give Rey pause. She bites her lip, and then, when she finally speaks, her voice is much quieter.

“I guess not.”

“No heroes, Rey,” she says gently, and the girl pouts a little.

“I thought you were telling me a story about a hero.”

And Asajj is, more or less. At least as close as one could reasonably come to telling a true story about a hero.

“Let me tell the story, brat,” she says, softening her words with a laugh. “So these apprentices were hunting children who, in another life, maybe could’ve grown into Jedi. But there were no Jedi anymore, and so these children were at the mercy of the dark. Except that one of these children found a Jedi child who had escaped the purge and grown into a man, and together they trained and grew stronger.”

Rey is leaning in closer now, enthralled. Asajj looked away, eyes on the horizon.

“But strength never goes unnoticed, and neither does rebellion. And so, they all came together. The child and the child who had become a man who was his master, the old Jedi and the apprentice of the dark who had once been her friend. They came together at this,” here Asajj pauses, trying to decide how to describe the temple. She had been there once herself, with Dooku, and while at the time she had reveled in it, in her memory it’s always a horrible putrid black pyramid, poisonous in the dark. “At a temple. Of the dark. And ultimately, the Jedi put herself between the apprentice and the child.”

“Did she die?” Rey asks quietly.

Asajj shrugs.

“Depends what you mean. The woman who came out of that temple wasn’t the same one who went in. So in that way, yes, I suppose she did.”

Rey’s nodding slowly beside her. There’s something about the way her eyebrows have pulled down that tells Asajj that Rey has seen this happen herself.

“What was she like afterwards?”

Asajj reaches into one of her belt pouches and pulls out a single cold shard of kyber, handing it to Rey. It’s one of the focusing crystals from her sabers, not that she’s carried a saber in years. But all the same, she can’t quite bring herself to get rid of it. Rey’s turning it over in her hand, and Asajj can tell just by looking at her face that she can feel the way it glows in the Force, even if she couldn’t have expressed it in those words herself.

“Like that,” she says, waving a hand towards the crystal. “Hard. Sharp. Bright.”

“Like sand after lightning strikes it,” Rey says, absently running a finger over the edge of the crystal.

“Yes.”

There’s a pause, and then Rey asks, “Do you think that that Jedi’s a hero?”

Asajj shrugs.

“Closer than most.”

Rey nods, eyes still on the crystal.

“I think she is. She tried to protect people. I think that’s what makes a hero, and why there aren’t really any on Jakku. No one cares about anyone else on Jakku.”

“It’s not that different in the rest of the galaxy, kid.”

Rey hums noncommittally.

“I’m gonna try to be like her,” Rey says, finally, handing the crystal back to Asajj. “I don’t want to be like everyone else on Jakku. I want to be like the Jedi.”

Asajj wraps her fingers tight around it, and finds that it’s glowing warmly against her skin.

“A worthy goal,” she says evenly, considering the girl beside her. And then she reaches her hand out and drops the crystal back into Rey’s palm. “I have no more use for it,” she says at Rey’s confused look.

“And I do?” The words tumble out alongside a surprised laugh.

Asajj had found that crystal almost fifty years ago, back on Jedha before the city was a crater in the ground that groaned and bled into the Force. She had been there with Tano, and the other woman had taught her to make a saber the Jedi way. Those two sabers, long gone now, were the only ones Asajj had ever built for herself. She tries not to read too much into that, now.

“It’s kyber,” she says instead of any of that. “Used to power the Jedi’s lightsabers. And it conducts and focuses energy that a lot of lesser materials would be blown apart by.”

Rey’s looking at the crystal with a much more considering eye now, the eye of an engineer. There’s more to kyber than that, of course, but Asajj is hardly the person to try to teach this blinding bright girl the ways of the Force. She isn’t even sure that there are ways of the Force at this point, or if there ever were.

“Well,” Rey says after a moment, curling her fist around the crystal. “Thank you, then.”

“Just so,” Asajj says, and Rey nods as they both look back up at the stars.

 

* * *

 

 

When the Republic still existed, at least in name, there were med stations scattered throughout the civilized galaxy. They orbited trade hubs and stopovers on the hyperspace lanes, and they were run by the Jedi. And, perhaps most importantly, they would treat any injury without asking any questions. Those stations were long gone.

The nav computer at Asajj’s elbow dings, startling her out of the vague haze she’s sunken into, and she pulls back on the throttle. Her ship drops out of hyperspace, bucking like an eopie whose rider had yanked back on the reins too hard. She pulls her left hand away from her side, needing it to steady the yoke as she came in for a landing. It’s tacky with blood, and, without the pressure, the wadded bandage falls away, allowing blood to start flowing from the wound again. She can hear the low whirr of the engines downshifting, the creaking of the exterior armor as it swells with the heat of reentry, her own ragged breathing, and, under it all, the steady drip of blood from her side onto the paneling at her feet. When she hits sand, something sparks in the control panel in front of her, and the entire cockpit goes dark. It isn’t her worst landing, not really, but it ranks.

It is night again on Jakku, and she can see the stars clearly through the viewport, bright against the black. It’s incredible to her how clear the stars are on this Force-forsaken planet, as if the heat has somehow burned out the cloud and dullness of the atmosphere. They are blurring a little bit, though, but Asajj is pretty sure that’s the blood loss. She reaches down, fumbling for the bloody rag, and reapplies it to her side, pressing down almost savagely. Then she tries to stand up and immediately lists sideways, only saved from falling over when she catches herself on the console in front of her. She pauses for a moment, hand braced on the blacked out shield readouts, and then she leans to the side until she feels her shoulders hit the bulkhead. She has a medkit somewhere in the back but— Her knees go weak, and she slides down the bulkhead until she is sitting on the floor, staring upwards, her vision going dark at the edges.

 _What a way to die,_ she thinks idly. _After everything._

But even now, the black is comforting.

 

She wakes to a pounding at the airlock and sunlight spilling across the cabin through the viewport. It’s dawn light, gray and quiet, and Asajj has a headache. Or maybe it’s just that her whole body hurts, she can’t tell. The pounding resumes, and Asajj realizes suddenly that it’s not the pounding of someone who is expecting an answer. It’s the pounding of someone trying to break in. Almost as soon as the thought crosses her mind something cracks, and the airlock hisses open, something it definitely isn’t supposed to do, even with the damage the ship has sustained. Asajj’s hand falls to her blaster. There is a long silence, probably the scavenger—that’s what it has to be, Asajj thinks, one of the scavengers—checking for booby-traps, and then, apparently satisfied that it is safe, quick light steps up the ramp and into the main hold.

Asajj’s blaster bolt splatters harmlessly across the bulkhead behind where the scavenger’s head had been a moment before. At the last second, they had ducked and had now spun around to face her. Medium height, the tan clothing that is Jakku’s norm, a long strip of fabric and googles obscuring their entire face. All of this only takes a moment for Asajj to notice, and her finger has already tightened on the trigger again when the stranger speaks.

“Asajj?”

And then she realizes what the headache is. Not the blood loss, although it’s probably contributing, but the uncontrolled burning of Rey in the force. Asajj yanks her hand up, and the bolt veers up with it, this time blackening the ceiling.

“Don’t break into other people’s ships, brat,” she says, not moving. Her legs are shaking even without her trying to put weight on them.

“You’re hurt,” Rey says, ignoring the blaster bolts and Asajj’s mildly combative tone and dropping to her knees beside her.

She sheds googles and head wrap first, then uses her teeth to pull off the bulky leather gloves she is wearing so that she can shove them in her pack. Underneath it all, she has filled out in some ways, looking more like a woman and less like a girl, but there is still something almost skeletal about her, the look of someone who has always been a little hungry. Her hands are quick and strong, though, peeling the rag away from Asajj’s side, and then pressing it back hard enough to push an unconscious gasp from her.

“Easy, brat.” Her voice is breathier than she’d like.

Rey frowns, and then asks, “Medkit?”

Asajj jerks her head towards a set of drawers set into the wall, and Rey pauses only long enough to take one of Asajj’s wrists, bringing her hand to her side and forcing her to push down on the wound, before she jumps to her feet and began riffling through the drawers. There is grease smudged on her check and an arc of freckles across her nose and all her skin is tanned. Her hair is the same, though, still that dark brown pulled up in three little buns. Asajj lets her head fall back against the bulkhead, eyes drifting closed despite herself.

“Stop that.”

Rey’s voice is loud and too close, and she is gently patting Asajj’s cheek, waking her up. Asajj’s eyes snap open, and she finds Rey kneeling right in front of her again, med supplies clutched in one hand. She is frowning, and she smells like sun and sand and sweat. And then she sets to work, her hands sure and precise, and Asajj watches the sun creep its way into the cabin and waits.

 

In the end, Asajj spends the afternoon curled up in her fold down bunk at the back of the cabin, watching Rey worm her way under the main console to fix whatever short Asajj’s less than graceful landing had put in it. She has to admit, there is something about the girl that reminds her of Skywalker, and it isn’t just the dark hair and the sun tanned skin. It’s the easy, sure way she riffles through wires and realigns chips, the way that ships seem to almost speak to her. There’s a snap and then a thump as Rey jams an access panel closed, and then she shimmies her way out from under the console that is humming and glowing once more.

“The damage report is—”

“I know,” Rey says, waving her off absentmindedly with one hand while she rubs the other on her pant leg, trying to wipe off the grease. A moment later, she says, “Ok, it looks like there’s a little bit of structural damage with your landing struts, but your engines and shields are fine. It’ll probably be cheaper to get it repaired off world. Unkar’ll gouge you.”

“Alright.” Asajj considers her for a moment. “So what do I owe you, then, brat?”

At that, Rey finally turns around, a wrinkle between her eyebrows. And then it disappears, and she grins, bright as the Jakku sun itself.

“Nothing.” She’s laughing, too. “It’s just a favor.”

Asajj quirks an eyebrow, but she’s smiling too.

“No such thing.”

Rey shrugs.

“I’m making an exception. You know, fair trade for the stories. And this.” Her smile goes wistful, and she hooks a finger through a cord around her neck and pulls out Asajj’s old kyber crystal from where it had been hidden underneath her shirt.

“Right,” Asajj says, not willing to press the point or admit to the little twist in her chest at the sight. And then, pushing aside the moment of fondness, she adds, “Might as well use the ‘fresher while it’s here.”

Rey’s face brightens again at the prospect of a shower with real water, and she promptly disappears into the tiny refresher. Asajj crosses her arms across her chest and does her best to consider the whole thing objectively. She needs to keep moving. She doubts that even Jakku can hide her from what’s after her. Besides, she doesn’t want that _thing_ , that hissing, seething mass of darkness that’s hidden itself in the Unknown Regions, to get anywhere near Rey. She can’t teach the girl, doesn’t want to and doesn’t trust herself to, but she can’t let something like _that_ get its claws into her either.

Rey emerges from the ‘fresher with her hair already done up in those three familiar knobs, the rules of the desert too engrained in her to allow for luxuriating in the water. Feels too much like waste, probably. Asajj remembers the feeling.

“What happened,” Rey asks, eyes bright as she sits down with a bounce on the other end of the bunk. “There’s blaster burns all over your hull plating, not to mention you. I didn’t think anything _could_ hurt you.”

Asajj laughs at that, and it’s a startled sound.

“I’m not invincible,” she says, laughter wheezing out against her better judgement, and her side burns underneath the fuzz of the painkillers.

Rey waves that away with surprising ease. “But really, what happened?”

Asajj considers her for a moment, and then says, “The First Order did.”

Rey’s eyes go wide, and then she leans forward. “The First Order? Why?”

“You ask too many questions, brat,” she replies without rancor. “It doesn’t matter. Right now I need to move before I bring them down on top of you.”

Asajj stands then, bones and joints creaking. She’d gotten old at some point, when she wasn’t looking. She’d gotten old, and the galaxy had died and been reborn around her, and it’s supposed to be different, isn’t it? But she recognizes it all the same, like nothing’s changed. Like everything’s an echo of the past.

“You’ll be careful.” She looks down and finds Rey looking up at her, fingers curled around the kyber crystal. The girl’s brows are furrowed. “Right?”

“I’m always careful,” Asajj says dismissively. And then, when the frown doesn’t disappear. “I’ve been keeping ahead of these bastards for thrice as long as you’ve been alive.” Gentler, now. “I’ll be fine.”

It is, perhaps, not fully the truth. Just playing the numbers, Asajj should’ve been dead by now. Force knows everyone else she’s known is. Besides, it depends on where she turns the nose of this ship after she leaves Jakku. And maybe Rey sees a bit of that in her eyes, because not even those words have smoothed away the crease between Rey’s brows when the girl speaks.

“And no story this time, either.”

It’s a joke, but, if Rey had been anyone else, Asajj would’ve thought she was close to crying. She rests a hand on the girl’s shoulder. She thinks that if they both stood, they’d be of a height, and, for the first time in years, she wishes she still had her sabers. Not the hand-me-downs from Dooku, but the pair she built on a frigid peak on Jedha, with Tano seated crosslegged beside her. It’s the first time in her life she’s ever wanted something to pass on to the next generation. But, no matter.

“Tell your own story, brat.” She says after a moment, and then squeezes the girl’s shoulder. “Something tells me you’re made for them.”

Rey laughs at that. “I’m just Rey. Just a scavenger.”

“And I’ve seen slave boys wreck the galaxy from top to bottom,” Asajj scoffs. “The Force never cares where you come from.”

That unfamiliar fondness wells up again from somewhere in her chest at the way Rey’s nose crinkles at that, and she holds on to it for just a moment before brushing it away. This bright desert child, too strong for her own good and with no one to protect her. No one but herself.

“Now go on,” Asajj says, suddenly coming to a decision and gesturing towards the airlock. “I have things to do. People to kill.”

She knows the smile pulling at her lips is slightly feral, but she doesn’t care. She was born for blood, born from it, and baptized in it again and again. It’s time, perhaps, to put all that to use again, leave some scars in this pale imitation of Sidious’s empire. Time to remind it that there are still people in this wretched galaxy with claws. It would be good to bloody her hands again, this time for a cause that’s worth the cost. And it would be good to distract the First Order from where she had been before. Let them think of Jakku as the junkyard it is. Let them not think to look too closely, close enough to catch sight of this sun bright girl. She thinks Tano would agree with that much, at least, even if not the rest.

Rey pauses at the airlock, pack on her shoulder, and looks back, and Asajj can practically see all the words at war on her lips.

“Good luck,” she says, finally.

Asajj nods, and then, pulled out from the forgotten depths of her, she says, “May the Force be with you, brat.”

Rey smiles at her, bright and blinding, and then she’s gone. And Asajj, well, she sets to the old and familiar work of deciding how best to slip a knife into the side of a Sith lord. Her ship shakes slightly as it lifts off, then steadies as it gains speed. It is time, she thinks, to stop running.

 

* * *

 

 

There’s only one person who notices the moment when Asajj Ventress is folded over, folded under into the Force, impaled on the spitting red blade of an angry child. Rey wakes up in the middle of the night, her face wet with tears and her chest aching like hot metal’s been pushed through it, but she doesn’t know why.

 

A few weeks later and several systems away, General Organa listens to an intelligence report.

“Well, they’re upset about something,” Major Ematt says, with a gesture meant to encompass the entirety of the First Order as represented by dark red outlines and pins on the starmap before them. “They had a base right in the heart of their territory that was wiped right off the map. Some of the reports we’re intercepting are saying that just one woman did it, too.”

“One woman?” Poe Dameron leans on the table, a little smile pulling at the corner of his mouth. “We should recruit her.”

Leia doubts very much that there is anyone left alive to recruit, but she lets the joke stand. They have little enough to laugh about these days, anyway. The meeting moves on, but she wonders who she was, this woman who could walk up to the front door of the First Order and blow it hell. Leia finds that, despite herself, she is a little bit jealous of this mysterious woman, but she sets that aside, along with a whole host of other thoughts about the Unknown Regions and who lives in them and who dies in them.

 

* * *

 

 

They had planned to arrive back on D’Qar during the base’s evening, but they had made the mistake of trusting the Falcon’s nav clock instead of doing the calculations by hand, so instead they had landed in the middle of the morning, when the Resistance base would’ve been roiling like an overturned anthill even without their arrival. There was no one there to greet them when they land, which seemed to suit Luke just fine.

He’d been surprisingly quiet for the whole trip, not that he was ever particularly effusive. Reflective, as Chewie had described it, but the kind of reflective that didn’t mind when Rey interrupted it. So she had, repeatedly, with whatever she could think of. Mostly that meant spreading out her current project on the holochess table between them, and then asking his advice on every modification she made to the astromech brain in front of her. Not that she needed his advice, mind you, but she thought that maybe he liked giving it. Maybe. He was hard to read, but she thought that’s what the faint twinkle in his eye when she had asked about the pros and cons of solid state memory drives, or the little twitch of his beard that, she hoped, hid a smile when she had lost her temper, torn out two hours’ worth of work, and asked him the best way to rewire the heat sink, meant.

Regardless, they’re here, and no one has really noticed. Or, at least, not the people she _wants_ to notice. Luke and Chewie went off to find General Organa, and then Poe Dameron appeared, briefly, almost by magic and hugged her before realizing that they hadn’t ever been properly introduced. She left the ramp to the Falcon open for a while, sitting in the cockpit and hoping to hear footsteps, but all she got was the sound of flight bay gossip, so now she’s closed the ramp and gone into the ‘fresher to wash her hair instead. Because she has nothing better to do, of course. Not because she wants her hair to look nice.

The ‘fresher on the Falcon is a bit of a disgrace, really. It had clearly once been bigger, but someone (judging by the clumsy weld marks, probably Unkar) had transformed half of it into a weapons locker. Now, Rey had no idea why you would want a weapons locker in your ‘fresher, but there it was, and it took up most of the space that, otherwise, would’ve been left for cabinets or a proper sink or, you know, room to breathe. In practice, this meant that the space was so cramped that you had to wedge yourself down the narrow “hallway” between the locker and the wall, shove the door to the sonic shower open, and then wedge yourself into that. The room might’ve been comfortable if you were approximately the size of an ewok, but any bigger and it felt a little bit like being buried alive.

Considering the fact that Rey spent most of her time on the Falcon with Chewie, who considered clothing a clever work around for the average humanoid’s general lack of fur but wasn’t particularly disturbed by its absence, she had adopted the position that it was perfectly reasonable to leave her clothes in her room when she took a shower. Naked was naked. It just meant that there was more skin available for the sun to burn blisters into. She had taken to wrapping a towel around her only after Chewie had suggested that, while he didn’t much care, in general, most humanoids did. She figured he would know better than she would—after all, she had never been in a situation on Jakku where the topic would’ve come up.

So, she has a towel wrapped under her arms, as usual. And she has hotwired the lock on the ‘fresher door since turning on the sonics had shorted it out, as usual. And she is walking across the main common area, as usual. Except that there is someone standing next to the holochess table. A familiar someone.

“Finn!” It comes out much higher pitched than she had intended, but she doesn’t care. He startles towards her, eyes going wide, and he’s there. He’s standing there, moving and breathing on his own with his eyes open, and she hasn’t seen his face since she’d left D’Qar almost four months ago, and she practically launches herself at him, arms locking around his neck. “You’re ok.”

Which she’d known, of course, but there’s a difference between knowing and seeing. Also, irritatingly, Finn isn’t hugging her back properly. He had started to fold his arms around her, but then his hands had jumped away when they had touched her upper back. And then he had almost settled his hands on her hips, but then had jerked away from that too.

“Rey,” he says, but his voice sounds slightly strangled as he says it.

Even as she releases him, she’s going through possibilities. What had she missed? They had hugged before, what was the difference between then and…

She looks up, and finds him starring determinedly at a fixed point over her head, a blush darkening his cheeks. And, well, ok. Point to Chewie for reading her own species better than she can. She isn’t sure if she should be embarrassed, either, although she does feel bad for making Finn—Standing here! Breathing and doing things!—uncomfortable.

“Oh,” she says. “I should put clothes on, shouldn’t I.”

“Please,” Finn says, cheeks going another shade darker. He sounds a little bit like he’s recently been punched in the solar plexus.

She slips past him into the cabin, and then drops the towel in favor of underwear and pants and a shirt. Probably best to be clothed, anyway, she thinks, pulling her gray tunic on over her head, although she doesn’t think she’d react the same way if _he_ were the one in the towel. That would be… She doesn’t have the word. Nice doesn’t cover it. He’s still a little red when she reappears, but he grins at her now. White teeth against dark skin, and, this time, when she hurls herself at him, he catches her and hugs her tightly, one broad hand spread across the back of her neck and one arm locked tightly around her waist.

“I’m so glad you’re ok,” she says, nose pressed into his shoulder. He’s still wearing that leather jacket.

“Me too,” he says. They’re the same height, and he has his face pressed into her shoulder too. “I’m glad you’re home.”

Home, she thinks, and it sends a spark down her spine. Is that what this is? They break apart, and Finn looks like he’s about to say something, but then his brow furrows briefly and he gestures towards her chest.

“What is that?”

She glances down, and then realizes that the leather thong that she uses to tie Asajj’s kyber crystal around her neck has fallen out of her shirt. It’s an old habit to never take it off. She used to bring her scavenger’s tools with her into the sonic shower stall back on Jakku too.

“Oh,” she says, hooking her thumb through it to draw it away from her chest. “A friend gave it to me a long time ago.” It doesn’t seem quite right to refer to Asajj that way, but how else, really? Not a mentor, not a mother. “It’s a kyber crystal.”

Finn’s brow furrows. “Like in _The Finalizer_ ’s turbolasers?”

“No, like in lightsabers,” she snaps. And then, “Well, yes. But they were in lightsabers first.”

His face clears. “It’s pretty.”

“And strong,” she says. “I don’t think anything can break it. Not that I’m gonna try.”

“I didn’t know you had any friends on Jakku,” he says after a moment.

Rey pauses to consider that. She’s never told anyone about Asajj, not even Luke when he’d asked about the crystal. She hadn’t known it at the time, of course, but now that she’s trained with Luke and fought with—and the name sends anger hissing up her spine that she has to expel on her next breath—Kylo Ren, she knows that Asajj wasn’t quite… right. Rey had always read Asajj as dangerous, just not dangerous to her, and that reading of people, that ability to look at someone and just _know_ , she knows now is part of the Force. So no, she hadn’t told Luke that a maybe-Sith had come and told her stories every six months for most of her childhood. But Finn. Well, Finn would understand better than anyone that even if someone used to belong to a bad group of people, that didn’t necessarily make _them_ bad.

“Um,” she says articulately.

He’s looking at her with an open, curious expression, like he would listen no matter what she was talking about. And he would, she thinks, and she would listen to him. So she sits down at the holochess table and, after a moment, he sits across from her.

“She was a smuggler, or a trader, I think,” she says. “And she was the only person on Jakku who was ever kind to me. She used to tell me stor—” Rey pauses, swallows. It’s been years, but it still hurts the same way it did when it first became clear that Asajj wasn’t coming back to Niima Outpost. That, probably, there was nothing left of her to come back. “She used to tell me stories. Maybe it’s time for me to tell one about her.”

**Author's Note:**

> LINER NOTES:
> 
> 1\. Asajj’s associate in the first section is Aphra. There’s no reason anyone should be able to guess that, but that’s who it is. I like all my morally questionable ladies to know each other.
> 
> 2\. I find the culture clash between Asajj, the literal former Sith apprentice, and Rey, the girl who thinks Luke Skywalker is a myth, insanely endearing, and it’s 90% of why I wrote this. I like the idea of Finn asking her later how the hell she got the idea that Luke was a myth, and Rey retelling these stories that Asajj had told in all seriousness, but Rey had interpreted as fairytales.
> 
> 3\. Fun facts I learned about menstruation while writing this: only humans and our close relatives (like chimps) menstruate the way we think of “menstruation.” Most animals just like… reabsorb that fertile uterine lining. So it is, in fact, totally plausible that Danthomiri women wouldn't menstruate, since they evolved within a completely different ecosystem from humans. The more you know!
> 
> 4\. I never liked the way Asajj’s part of “The Wrong Jedi” played out, so, as far as I’m concerned, she actively tried to help Ahsoka and then traveled with her for a while before Order 66. A kind of reluctant allies / frenemies kind of deal. Justice for Asajj 2kforever, etc. etc.
> 
> 5\. The stories Asajj tells are, of course, the story of the Original Trilogy and the Rebels season 2 finale.
> 
> 6\. Obviously, Asajj’s saber situation post-“The Wrong Jedi” is very different from canon. Maybe I’ll write a full length fic about it someday, but the short version is that instead of buying a single saber off the black market, she built a new set of sabers while she was traveling with Ahsoka before Order 66.
> 
> 7\. I ultimately had to make a choice between the ending for Asajj that fit the themes of this piece and the one that I wanted. Unfortunately, I couldn’t bring myself to sacrifice the thematic resonance for a 100% happy ending, so here we are. Watch me write an AU to my own AU so that Asajj can live _forever_.
> 
> 8\. Finn has a weird sense of modesty because he was raised in barracks. Rey has no sense of modesty because she’s a feral desert child. That’s my story, and I’m sticking to it.
> 
> 9\. Why is everything made out of kyber crystal, anyway. They used it in the Death Star too. Anyway, “The strongest stars have hearts of kyber” and all that.
> 
> As always, you can find me on tumblr @ [bobafett](http://bobafett.tumblr.com/).


End file.
